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A diverse group of speech scientists and engineers has developed the ToBI (TOnes and Break Indices) prosodie transcription system and materials to teach it to transcribers. ToBI consists of parallel tiers reflecting the multiple components of prosody, the most important being a tone tier, for intonational analysis, and a break index tier, for indicating strength of coherence or disjuncture between adjacent words. To assess the system, we measured inter-transcriber agreement on utterances representative of the varied types of speech important to researchers, employing a diverse set of transcribers ranging from experts to newly-trained users. Consistency was measured in terms of number of transcriber pairs agreeing on the labeling of each particular word, a stringent metric. Using this metric, we observe 88% agreement on the presence or absence of a particular category of tonal element, and 81% agreement on the …